Why your website is not bringing in enquiries

Say you run a roofing company. Word of mouth keeps you busy, and two years ago you paid for a website that looks smart: a large photo of a finished roof, your logo, a headline that reads “Quality you can rely on.” Friends say it looks professional. In two years it has produced four enquiries, and two of those were people selling advertising.

This business is hypothetical, but the pattern is common, and the tempting conclusion (“websites don’t work for a business like ours”) is usually wrong. Something specific is failing, and the order in which you look for it matters, because fixing the wrong thing costs money and changes nothing.

A site cannot convert visitors it does not have. Before changing a single word, find out how many people reach the site and how they get there.

If your site is connected to Google Search Console (it is free), its Performance report shows how often your pages appeared in Google results (impressions), how often someone clicked (clicks), and the searches that triggered them. Google defines impressions as how many times your site appeared in search results, and clicks as the number of times a user clicked through to it.

Read it with three questions in mind:

• Are there impressions for searches a customer would type? “Roof repair” plus your town is a customer search. Your own business name is not: those people already know you.
• Are there impressions but almost no clicks? Then people see you in results and choose someone else. Your page titles and descriptions may not say what you do or where.
• Are there almost no impressions at all? Then the problem is visibility, and no amount of redesign will fix it alone. Google is clear that publishing a page does not guarantee it will be crawled, indexed or shown, even when the page follows its guidelines. Our guide to why a website is not showing up on Google covers that case.

If visitors are arriving from the wrong places (an old directory, an unrelated search, a country you do not serve), the site may be working fine for an audience that will never buy. That is a search and content problem, covered on our SEO service page.

Nielsen Norman Group's analysis of how long people stay on web pages found that users often leave within 10 to 20 seconds, and that the first 10 seconds decide whether they stay. Pages that make their value clear can hold attention much longer.

A common reason a good-looking site brings nothing is here. The design is good, and the words are vague. "Quality you can rely on" is a sentence any business on earth could use. A visitor who needed a flat roof fixed this week reads it and still does not know whether you fix flat roofs, whether you cover their area, or whether you take small jobs.

Try this test. Show your homepage to someone who does not know your business for five seconds, then close it. Ask them three things: what do we sell, who is it for, and where do we work? If they cannot answer all three, the message is the problem, whatever the design looks like.

Here is the roofer's headline again, rewritten for the same hypothetical business:

• Before: Quality you can rely on.
• After: Flat and pitched roof repairs across Bristol and Bath, from a single slipped tile to a full replacement.

The second version is longer, and it does three jobs the first cannot: it names the service, the area and the range of job sizes. A good design gives a sentence like that room; it cannot replace it.

For a business that travels to its customers, the service area is often the first thing a visitor checks and the last thing a website states. If the area is buried in the footer, a visitor from the next town over assumes you do not cover them and leaves.

Put the area near the top of the page, in plain words, and repeat it where it matters: on each service page and next to the contact form. Google's own guidance for service-area businesses on Business Profile gives a useful sense of scale: up to 20 service areas, with an overall boundary of no more than about two hours' driving from where the business is based. If your website claims "nationwide" while your Business Profile says two counties, both the visitor and the search engine get mixed signals.

The same applies to who you serve. If you only take commercial work, or only homes, say so early. It loses you enquiries you did not want and earns trust from the ones you do.

People rarely read web pages word by word. In Nielsen Norman Group's long-running research on reading online, 79 percent of test users scanned any new page and only 16 percent read word by word. They are scanning for answers to their own questions. If the answers are missing, they do not call to ask: they go back to the search results and try the next business.

Write down the questions a new customer asks on the phone in the first two minutes. For most service businesses they include:

• Do you do this kind of job, and this size of job?
• Do you cover my area?
• Roughly what does it cost, or how do you price it?
• How soon could you start?
• What happens after I get in touch?
• Why should I trust you (qualifications, insurance, guarantees you actually offer, photos of real work)?

Then check whether each answer is on the page, in words a visitor can find by scanning: headings that name the topic, short paragraphs, and lists. If you cannot publish prices, explain how you price ("a written quote after a site visit") rather than saying nothing. Silence on cost can read as "expensive" to visitors.

Open your site on your own phone and try to contact yourself. Time it. Common problems:

• The phone number is an image or plain text that cannot be tapped to call.
• The only contact route is a page called “Contact” in a menu that has to be opened first.
• The form asks for things you could find out later: a full address, a budget, how they heard of you, a project description with a minimum length.
• Error messages appear only after submission, or clear the whole form.

Each extra field is extra work for the visitor. Nielsen Norman Group's form guidance recommends removing any field you can collect later or work out another way, and reports that forms following its usability guidelines achieved 78 percent one-try submissions against 42 percent for forms that violated them. For a first enquiry, name, a way to reply, and one short question ("What do you need?") is often enough. You can ask the rest when you call back.

This is the least glamorous cause. Forms break quietly. A plugin update stops emails being sent, a change of email address leaves the form posting to an old inbox, or every enquiry lands in a spam folder. Nothing on the website looks wrong.

Test it now: submit your own form with a recognizable message, from a phone and from a computer, and confirm the message arrives in the inbox someone actually reads. Repeat this every month, and after any change to the site or your email.

Then make sure enquiries are counted. In Google Analytics 4 you can mark the important actions on your site as key events. Google's recommended event for a lead is generate_lead, described as a visitor who “submits a form or a request for information.” Count it only when the form has really been sent successfully, and count phone taps and email clicks separately, because a tap on a phone number is an intent, not a conversation. If enquiries are not measured, you cannot tell whether a change helped. The guide to tracking where your website enquiries come from shows an owner-level setup, and our analytics service page explains what we set up on a project.

Conversion rate here means enquiries divided by visits. It is the number most owners ask about, and the honest answer is that there is no single good figure.

The largest public dataset we found is a landing-page study, not a whole-website study: Unbounce's 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report analyzed over 41,000 landing pages and found a median conversion rate of 6.6 percent across all industries, with industry medians ranging from 3.8 to 12.3 percent. Landing pages are single-purpose pages that often receive paid or email traffic, so the figure is not a target for a whole business website, where many visitors come to check opening hours, read about the company or look for a job. The range across industries is the useful lesson: the figure depends on what you sell, who arrives and why.

The comparison that matters is with your own history. If your site produced eight enquiries a month last year from a similar number of visits and now produces three, something changed, and the six steps above will usually find it. If you have never measured, start now and build your own baseline before judging the site against anyone else's.

1. Traffic. Check Search Console and Analytics: are the right people arriving, from searches a customer would make?
2. Message. Run the five-second stranger test on your homepage and main service page.
3. Area and audience. Is where you work and who you work for visible near the top?
4. Answers. List the first-call questions and check each answer is on the page.
5. Contact path. Contact yourself from a phone and remove every field you do not need.
6. Delivery and measurement. Send a test enquiry and confirm it arrives and is counted.

Some reasons a site is quiet sit outside the website, and it is better to know that before you spend money:

• Low demand. If very few people search for what you do in your area, a better site converts a larger share of a small number. That is still worth doing, but referrals, a Business Profile or advertising may matter more.
• The offer itself. A site can explain a price clearly. It cannot make an uncompetitive price competitive.
• Reputation elsewhere. Some buyers check reviews on other platforms before they contact anyone. A website cannot outweigh a poor record there.
• Small numbers. With a few hundred visits a month, a change in enquiries from four to six may be chance. Watch the trend over several months, and ask new customers how they found you.

If the checks point to the site itself (the message, the answers or the contact path), the fix is usually a rethink of the main pages rather than a new coat of paint. Our redesign service is planned around what you already have: every page gets a decision (keep, improve, merge or retire), and so does every old address. If you have no site yet, see custom website design.

If you are not sure what to track once enquiries start, read what to measure on a business website. To get a second pair of eyes on your situation, tell us about your project, and we reply with next steps. No cost, no obligation. Discuss your project

Google Search Console Help, “Performance report (Search results)”: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553

Google Search Central, “In-depth guide to how Google Search works” (no guarantee of crawling, indexing or serving): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works

Nielsen Norman Group, a usability researcher, “How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?” (2011): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-long-do-users-stay-on-web-pages/

Nielsen Norman Group, a usability researcher, “How Users Read on the Web” (1997): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/

Nielsen Norman Group, a usability researcher, “Website Forms Usability: Top 10 Recommendations” (2016): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/web-form-design/

Google Business Profile Help, “Manage your service areas for service-area and hybrid businesses”: https://support.google.com/business/answer/9157481

Google Analytics Help, “Recommended events” (generate_lead): https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9267735

Google Analytics Help, “About key events”: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/13128484

Unbounce, “Conversion Benchmark Report” (2024 data, 41,000+ landing pages): https://unbounce.com/conversion-benchmark-report/